What's New in Rust's "Power Trip" Update

Rust's August 2026 update, Power Trip, went live on Thursday, August 6th, and it's built around a single connecting idea: giving players a reason to actually maintain the map's monuments instead of looting them once and moving on. Facepunch is calling this theme Player Maintained Monuments, and it touches the Power Plant, Launch Site, Large and Small Oil Rig, the Abandoned Supermarket, Water Treatment Plant, Oxum's Gas Station, and the Airfield - all wired into one shared power grid.

Player Maintained Monuments

The Power Plant is the key to everything

New Heavy Fuses can be found as loot and plugged into special fuseboxes at the Power Plant to bring it back online. It doesn't all switch on at once - some of the monuments below need more fuses feeding the grid than others before their own features unlock. Once the plant is running, powerline poles along the roads (the ones with transformers) start carrying real electricity, and - as a nice side effect - can now be climbed by just walking up to one and jumping, no ladder required.

There's a balance change riding along with this: green recyclers outside safezones drop to 50% efficiency by default (down from their old baseline), climbing back up to 60% once the grid has enough power, plus a small recycle-duration buff at full power. Yellow recyclers inside safezones are untouched. A single new red recycler, running at 75% efficiency, has also been added to the Power Plant itself - but it only works once the grid is at maximum power.

Satellite Crash - a new server-wide event

With enough power reaching the Launch Site, the new Satellite Control Computer lets you aim and drop a satellite of your choosing. You steer the descent with thruster buttons - there's no manual, so figuring out which button does what is part of the challenge - then lock in a crash site. Everyone on the server can watch it come down, and once it's cooled off, the loot crates it scatters are up for grabs. The catch: the whole server saw it happen too.

Dome pumping, gas station lifts, and airfield terminals

A new switch on the Large Oil Rig pumps Crude Oil to Dome for 20 minutes once activated, but you can't collect it solo - you need a Tanker vehicle module to drain it and a car lift to extract it. Small Oil Rig has its own switch at half the pump rate, and running both at once nets 1.5x the Crude.

Oxum's Gas Station gets a powered car lift and garage door (openable from an outer wall switch once the grid or its backup generator is live), with better car-part loot in the cave below once you're using it. The Airfield's control tower has two new terminals: a smaller one that speeds up airdrop frequency server-wide, and a larger one that calls in a Chinook resupply crate near the tarmac - both draining their charge over time.

Supermarket Freezer and the Water Treatment Plant

The Abandoned Supermarket now has a freezer that provides a steady trickle of chilled food while powered, with an occasional larger food cache. The Water Treatment Plant is the most involved of the bunch: roadside water pipes across the map start empty, and getting them flowing means powering two in-monument gearboxes (which need the grid live plus a physical gear item, consumed on use) until the central water tank pressurizes and clears the blockages. After that first cold start, keeping it topped up is much easier than starting from scratch.

New in the item store

This month's paid content is the Bar Games Pack - a Pool Table and Dart Board, both playable solo or multiplayer with real-time scoring, alongside a Juke Box deployable, skins for the Mini Fridge and Shotgun Trap, bar stool seating, and themed wallpapers/sprays.

There's also a standalone Stone Sculpture deployable you can carve into any shape you want - purely cosmetic, purely for main-base bragging rights. You can see its live market price and history on the Stone Sculpture wiki page.

New skins released alongside Power Trip

This month's Workshop Skinnable is the Small Backpack - Rust's first new wearable skin slot in a while. A batch of new backpack, helmet, and weapon skins launched alongside the update:

• Chrome Runner Small Backpack
• No Mercy Small Backpack
• Cargo Heli Small Backpack
• Redemption Large Backpack
• Bucket Helmet from Hell
• Deep Sea Bucket Helmet
• Young Dragon AR
• Valkyrie Thompson

You can track live prices and price history for all of these - and see how they compare against the wider market - on the wiki's Market Index and Compare Skins tools.

Balance and quality-of-life changes

• Respawn points: you can now mark one bag/bed to show on the compass, and favourite bags on the death screen so they sort to the top of the respawn list.
• Recycle Bin upgrade: the workbench upgrade now has its own dedicated inventory for bonus items, so they no longer spill into your main storage automatically.
• Nodes in safe zones: ore nodes and woodpiles no longer spawn inside safe zones - they could only be harvested with a rock, so they piled up and starved node spawns elsewhere.
• Wolf Headdress: now needs a Tier 1 workbench to craft, bringing it in line with other helmets and giving other early-game options more room to compete. The Lunar New Year animal masks are now proper reskins of it instead of separate items.
• Shields: you can bind a toggle to swap a shield between "on your back, ADS-ready" and "held out to the side, blocking" - with a short cooldown so it can't be spammed mid-fight.
• High External Walls: now carry a static 20% upkeep cost, sitting between sheet (10%) and stone (33%) building-block costs, specifically to make base-sprawl / land-claiming with walls less cheap.
• Water Well vendor stock: stock per well dropped from 10 to 2 (restock time up from 2 to 10 minutes) - prices are unchanged, but it's meant to be a boost, not a full alternative to farming.
• Hover-looting fix: ALT-looting a body bag corpse now correctly swaps your equipped clothing instead of silently doing nothing mid-fight.
• Master Key: the Apartment Complex key finally has a proper view model and animations.

Under the hood: performance and tools

For server owners: Parallel Entity Saving lands in the experimental Jobs 4 mode, parallelizing one of the last serial bottlenecks in a server's per-frame processing - internal synthetic tests showed 1,000 entities saving in 3.6ms (down from 6.6ms) and 10,000 entities in 10.6ms (down from 64.4ms). The custom "FuzzyPool" memory pool introduced back in June has also been replaced after community server devs reported small object leaks under high contention; the new implementation matches or beats FuzzyPool's performance with zero leaks in testing.

Client-side, main menu startup is roughly twice as fast on most machines thanks to deferred asset loading, and the Demo UI got a full rebuild aimed at content creators - dolly cameras, a keyframe timeline, a sandbox mode, and PNG-sequence export (opt-in for now via demo.newui). Modders get new Community UI components (tooltips, canvas groups, image masking, server-side pie menus) and a heads-up: SetFlag is being removed from the codebase with the September 3rd wipe in favor of the newer disposable-pattern flag API.

Full changelist

Features

• Power Plant - New Heavy Fuses can be plugged into special fuseboxes to power up the island-wide power grid
• Power Plant - Added new red recycler
• Power Plant - Added another loot room, only accessible with sufficient power plant power
• Powerline poles can now provide electricity, amount dependent on power plant power
• Powerline poles which provide electricity can now be climbed
• Launch Site - New terminal for triggering satellite crash event
• Oil Rig - Dome Crude Oil pumping system
• Abandoned Supermarket - Added freezer that provides chilled food loot whilst receiving power from the power plant
• Water Treatment Plant - New mechanics for activating new water dispensers located around the map
• Oxum's Gas Station - Added functional car lift and powered garage door
• Airfield - Updated control tower, added new terminals for triggering airdrop and cargo helicopter events
• New demo UI

Improvements

• Green recyclers (outside safezones) now operate at 50% by default, restoring to 60% with sufficient power from the power plant, plus a 0.5s duration buff at maximum power
• Power Plant environment art updates for no power/powered on states
• IO entities can now have custom minimum/maximum wire slack levels; enforced minimum slack level for wires connected to powerline poles
• Art updates for the powerline poles which now provide electricity
• The Recycle Bin workbench upgrade now has its own storage and bonus items automatically go there
• NPC vendors that sold the Kayak and Paddle blueprints now just sell a kayak and a paddle
• The Snow Jacket has been given a sizable buff to bite and cold protection
• The Wolf Headdress (and skin variants such as LNY masks) now require a Tier 1 workbench to craft
• Improved texture sharpness overall, especially with TSSAA or DLSS
• Slightly improved performance when switching between anti-aliasing modes
• Added ability to show a sleeping bag/bed on the compass, and to favourite one so it's first in the respawn list
• Mildly improved performance of weather effects
• Blowpipe now costs 10 cloth to craft, down from 25
• Wooden Dart now does 50 damage, up from 40
• Bucket Helmet now costs 20 frags, down from 35, with a small buff to projectile and bite protection
• Collared Shirt has a small buff to radiation and projectile protection
• UsePlayerUpdateJobs 4 enables parallel entity saving
• Can now modify the volume of deployed boom boxes
• Reordered game UI navigation - crafting button is back on the right
• Removed the console's input field character limit
• Made siege weapons vulnerable to fire, as originally intended
• Added a new "snapping" bind for all snapping actions
• Improved startup loading times; optimised the F1 console and main menu open/close
• Terrain shader optimisations
• Vagabond deep sea treasure mission no longer requires returning to the Vagabond after finding the treasure
• Model added for the Master Key

Fixed

• Fixed battering ram not always damaging constructions
• Fixed decals not appearing at all on low settings
• Fixed being able to continue stealing items in apartments/shops after a break-in ends
• Fixed being able to jump through the ceiling of the medium apartment
• Fixed being unable to shoot other players inside apartments in hardcore mode
• Fixed cannons spawning in stacks higher than their max stack size
• Fixed water containers continuing to drain into a disconnected container
• Fixed workbench upgrades being lost inside T2/T3 workbench corpses (Softcore)
• Fixed not being able to place wooden or barbed wooden barricades
• Fixed armoured hot air balloon health resetting incorrectly after a server restart
• Fixed loot containers restarting rather than resuming their refresh cooldown after a server restart
• Fixed an exploit shortening the Hunter NPC's treasure mission repeat cooldown
• Fixed +prevskin and +nextskin not being bound by default
• Fixed main menu errors when Steam is unreachable
• Fixed hover-looting a body bag failing to swap equipped clothing mid-loot

Removed

• Removed UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 mode - Jobs 3 is now the default
• Stopped sending vending machine and event map markers (cargo, helis, travelling vendor) to Rust+

Want to see how the market's reacting to Power Trip's new skins in real time? Check the wiki's full skins browser, or track your own collection's value on My Inventory.